'Exile in Guyville,' 15 years later

Now that Liz Phair's "Exile in Guyville" is being repackaged on its 15th anniversary as an indie-rock landmark, it's easy to forget what a ruckus it caused when it first came out.

Though instantly acclaimed for its songwriting, "Exile" also had its share of detractors. Phair pressed a lot of buttons because she was a child of privilege, a North Shore kid educated at New Trier High School and Oberlin College in Ohio. When she drifted into bohemian Wicker Park to make a go of it as a visual artist and songwriter, she was regarded as an interloper who hadn't paid her dues.

On Tuesday at the Vic, Phair will return to the scene she left behind for California years ago to play "Exile" in its entirety. She is a far more assured performer today; back then, she hated to perform live, and rarely did. But she received attention from national magazines while scads of local rockers who had been toiling for years remained anonymous. This made her "the most hated woman in Chicago," according to her producer, Brad Wood, when interviewed shortly after "Exile" was released.

The singer also dared to compare her debut to rock's Holy Grail, "Exile on Main Street"; she said it was a song-by-song response to the Rolling Stones' 1972 classic. She also brought the wrath of feminists and the leers of Neanderthals by posing on its cover partially nude.

The "Who does she think she is?" outrage was exactly the point. The songs were a volatile mix of invective, humor, sex and sexual role-playing, laced with explicit language. They were Phair's unfiltered portrait of life in "Guyville," the Wicker Park haunts where her expectations about life and relationships were thrashed in long nights of dreaming, drinking and flirting.

"I've been taken for everything I own," she sings on "Johnny Sunshine." Yet for all its anger, "Exile" is also a darkly funny album. And it rocks. For all the talk about the content of Phair's songs, it wouldn't have mattered if they didn't stimulate the hips as much as the mind.

Many of the "Exile" songs first appeared on three homemade cassettes dubbed "Girly Sound" in 1991-92: One voice, one guitar and a whole lot of issues. Phair sang in a deep, deadpan voice, and tried to play intricate rhythm and lead lines simultaneously to make up for the lack of a backing band. The songs dealt with the toxic consequences of intimacy in a way that was rare for indie-rock: with an explicitness that suggested the bawdy R&B of Millie Jackson. But unlike Jackson's brassy tone, Phair's voice was small, narrow. It belonged to a girl who sounded as if she had "access to expensive grooming products," as Phair herself once said of her upbringing in tony Winnetka. It was a voice that seemingly had no business saying the things it did. And yet there it was, a bundle of contradictions: smutty yet literary, funny yet sad, smart yet impractical.

Dressed-up 'Girly Sound'

"Guyville" took the "Girly Sound" songs and dressed them up slightly. Producer Brad Wood preserved the songs' core: Phair singing while playing her guitar. Around that he arrayed drums and other rock instruments, but kept the proceedings relatively sparse. Its release in 1993 on the highly respected independent label Matador Records brought a flash flood of mostly laudatory reviews; at year's end it finished atop the Village Voice's nationwide poll of music critics and enabled Phair to land a major-label deal.

In a DVD accompanying the album's re-release, Phair looks back on its difficult birth, and with few exceptions, doesn't sugarcoat. Among the people she interviews is John Henderson, a longtime behind-the-scenes player in Chicago who hooked her up with Wood and helped shape the record in its early stages, only to abandon the project when he saw where Phair wanted to take things. Henderson wanted a smaller record that preserved the intimate tone he heard on "Girly Sound"; Phair veered toward a more rock-oriented approach.

A talent betrayed?

"I'm reminded of the famous Greil Marcus quote about Rod Stewart, something about how he wanted to be a rock star and all that entailed -- sitting by the pool, having sex with groupies and snorting coke -- and if he had to write great songs to do it, he was perfectly willing to write them," Henderson said of Phair when interviewed in the mid-'90s. "I think she betrayed her talent in much the same way."

He pretty much confirms that viewpoint, in less colorful language, on Phair's DVD, and to her credit she includes his less-than-charitable comments. She also admits that she was willing to lie and "take advantage of people" to get her music heard and her bank account fattened.

And that's exactly what happened after "Exile" became a hit. Phair's records became increasingly blander and slicker as she played out the string at the major labels. Now she's back on an indie, ATO, and recently told Billboard that "for the first time in 15 years, I feel creative."